Chapter 60
Half-Confessions
Elara
Life moves on the way weather does.
Indifferent. Unapologetic. Unaware of how close you came to disappearing.
The world doesn’t pause because you were taken underground and returned wrong.
Traffic still clogs Reykjavík at five. People still complain about the price of coffee like it’s a personal tragedy.
Couples still argue in grocery aisles about which brand of milk is “better,” as if any of it matters.
The news cycle swallows one horror and asks politely for the next, and somewhere in all that noise I exist again; walking streets I recognize, breathing air that feels too cold and too free.
It should feel like victory.
It doesn’t.
It feels like I am wearing my life like a borrowed coat. Familiar shape. Wrong fit. Too heavy in the shoulders.
I have been trying to be normal.
I live at my own place again now, my mother was finally ready to let me go.
I have been trying to be the girl who came back and continued.
The girl who smiles when coworkers call her “strong.” The girl who eats when her mother watches.
The girl who goes to therapy twice a week and uses words like grounding and triggers and coping mechanisms like they’re spells that will keep the past from reaching up and dragging her back under.
Some days it almost works.
Other days I catch myself pausing in doorways because my body needs to see the entire room before it agrees to enter.
I catch myself listening too hard to the ventilation in buildings, mapping exits, counting cameras, assessing shadows.
I catch myself watching men’s hands. I catch myself flinching when someone says the wrong word in the wrong tone, like my nervous system is still on his schedule.
And then there is the other thing.
The thing therapy doesn’t have an easy box for.
The fact that sometimes, when I’m alone and my house is quiet and the night presses against the windows like a lid, I think about him and my chest tightens, not with fear, not exactly, but with that ache you get when your body remembers something it shouldn’t crave.
His attention.
The way he looked at me like I was the only thing in the room that was real.
I meet my father again the way you meet a ghost. Not with a reunion. Not with a hug. Not with closure. In a place where he belongs: behind glass, behind locked doors, behind shadows that smell like chemicals.
He invite me to his place. Even though he doesn’t have one, not in the way my mother does.
My father lives the way he always has; inside controlled environments, sterile rooms where emotion doesn’t touch the counters and everything can be explained with numbers.
The way he has been spending the last fourteen years of his life.
He sends a message through a secure channel I pretend I don’t know how to access.
I should tell the police that the man who faked his death and sold nerve-warping chemicals to the underworld is alive and breathing and hiding in a lab like a rat in a wall.
But my throat still locks around his name, because he is still my father. The man who made me, whose genetics run in my veins, and who taught me what I know now.
And somewhere inside me, the part that has always been his, quiet, analytical, hungry, wants to look at the man that made me.
So I go again.
The building is tucked into the outskirts of Reykjavík, disguised as something unremarkable: a research annex, a private facility, a place with frosted windows and cameras that don’t blink. The kind of place you drive past without noticing because your brain categorizes it as not my business.
Of course it’s my business.
The security system recognizes me before the receptionist does. The doors open in a sequence that feels like being swallowed. Keypads. Scans. An elevator that descends without windows, the hum of it steady and indifferent, like it has done this for years.
I am not surprised by the underground.
Of course my father lives beneath the world.
The lab is brighter than Lucan’s bunker but it feels similar in all the wrong ways; sterile corridors, white walls that reflect sound, air filtered until it tastes like nothing.
I feel my spine tighten, my body remembering cement and heat and containment.
I have to force my breathing slow, deliberate, to remind myself I am here by choice.
A door opens at the end of the hall.
Henrik Vance steps out.
For a second my brain refuses to connect him to the father I mourned. His eyes are the same blue as mine, and that similarity hits like nausea. He looks at me like a scientist looking at a phenomenon he cannot replicate.
“Elara,” he says.
It does sound like it used it, and somehow I hate that. I hate myself for how quickly the child in me responds anyway.
“I’m here,” I say, flat.
His mouth twitches. “I can see that.”
Of course. Of course the man who faked his death and built his life on lies still thinks sarcasm is a useful tool.
He gestures for me to follow. His movements are careful, not because he’s afraid of me, but because he’s aware of the optics. He’s trying to look harmless. He’s trying to look like a man who deserves a chance at reconnection.
It almost makes me laugh.
We walk through the corridors. I notice everything: cameras, locked cabinets, chemical smell beneath the antiseptic. He still lives in labs. He still breathes in formulas. He still avoids the messy human world where consequences have faces.
We enter a room that feels less like a lab and more like a workshop; benches covered in equipment, glass vials lined up like teeth, notes pinned to boards, a computer screen full of graphs.
There’s a sealed vault door in the corner, thick metal, biometric lock, the kind you’d expect in a bank, not in a facility that pretends to be medical.
My gaze flicks to it.
Henrik notices immediately. “That’s not for you.” He exhales and moves toward the sink, washing his hands like he always does before he speaks, as if cleanliness is morality.
“I’ve retired,” he says, as if that sentence should mean something.
“You retired from ruining lives?” I ask. My voice is calm, but it has teeth. “How noble.”
Henrik’s jaw clenches. “From the market. From the network. The formulas are locked away. They are not being sold. They won’t be used again.”
I stare at him. “And you expect me to thank you for stopping after you already set the world on fire.”
His eyes flick to mine, cold and precise. “No, I don’t.”
A silence settles. It’s not comfortable. It’s not a bridge. It’s a gap. Something we, as father and daughter, will never fill again.
Finally he speaks again, quieter. “I’m treating Lucan’s sister.”
My stomach tightens at the name.
“How is it going,” I ask carefully, like the answer might explode.
Henrik looks toward a screen on the wall; numbers, charts, progress notes. “Better than I anticipated,” he says. “Not fast. Not dramatic. But there’s… stabilization. A treatment option that could extend her life and ease her symptoms.”
My pulse trips over itself. “So there’s hope.”
Henrik nods once. “Yes.”
A word I didn’t expect to hear from him, spoken without irony.
I swallow. “Have you spoken to him?”
Henrik’s gaze sharpens. “No.”
“Seen him?” I press.
“No,” he repeats. “And I won’t.”
“Because you’re afraid,” I say.
His eyes flicker with something, annoyance, guilt, maybe. “It’s better this way.”
Henrik’s mouth opens, closes. For a second he looks almost… tired. Like the constant calculus of consequences has finally reached his own skin.
“You won’t see him either,” he adds.
The sentence lands heavy.
I laugh once, dry and humorless. “You’re giving me orders now?”
Henrik’s eyes harden. “I’m giving you survival, and he was the one who ordered me to order you.”
“I survived him,” I snap, ignoring the rest.
Henrik studies my face, and something shifts in his expression, something clinical, assessing. “Did you?”
The question slices clean.
My hands curl into fists at my sides. I force my voice steady. “Yes.”
Henrik holds my gaze for a long moment, then looks away, like even he knows not to push that line further. “I heard from his sister he’s Level Three now,” he says, as if that explains everything. “A place where I came from. Devoid of kindness.”
I stare at him, disbelief rising. “You’re the one talking about kindness?”
His jaw tightens. “Kindness is irrelevant at that level.”
“No,” I say softly. “Kindness is the only thing that matters when you’re standing in front of a person and deciding if they live.”
Henrik’s eyes flick to me, sharp. “Then you understand why you should stay away.”
I want to scream.
I want to laugh.
But he’s right in one way: seeing Lucan again would ruin me.
Because I don’t know what I would do, even though that’s a lie too; I would stay. I would let him take me again.
My father gestures toward the vault door. “The formulas are in there. Locked. Along with everything that used to be my life.”
“And now?” I ask.
Henrik’s shoulders lift in a small, almost human shrug. “Now I experiment. Different things. Legitimate work. Work that doesn’t end in bodies.”
“Convenient,” I murmur.
He doesn’t respond. He moves to a counter and picks up a small glass container. Inside: a dried flower, deep purple, hooded like a monk. Monkshood.
My stomach drops.
Of course.
The symbol of poison and beauty. The flower I used to draw when I wanted to feel close to my father, back when I thought he was a dead hero, not a living villain.
Henrik holds it like it’s a key. “This is part of it,” he says. “A compound derived from aconitine, in a controlled micro-addition. It’s dangerous if mishandled. But in the right balance…” He pauses. “It helps.”
I stare at the flower until my vision blurs slightly.
I swallow the bitter laugh. “The universe has a sense of humor,” I say.
Henrik looks at me. “You always liked that flower.”
“I liked the idea of it,” I correct.
He sets the container down carefully. “I’m trying,” he says, quieter.
The words should make me feel something.
They don’t.
Trying doesn’t erase fourteen years. Trying doesn’t bring Halldórsson back. Trying doesn’t take the name Vapor out of my bloodstream.
Henrik steps closer, tentative, like he’s approaching a wild animal. “I’ve been trying to connect with you.”
I stare at him. “You missed my entire life.”
His face tightens. “I know.”
“You missed me becoming who I am,” I continue, voice steady, deadly. “You missed me graduating. You missed me choosing my career because I thought you drowned by accident. You missed me building an obsession out of your absence. You missed me losing my innocence to the underworld you helped build.”
His throat moves. He looks like he wants to say something that would make him feel better.
I don’t let him.
“It will never become what it used to be,” I say.
Henrik’s eyes flicker with something; pain, maybe, or just the discomfort of hearing reality spoken out loud.
“I know,” he says again.
I leave a few minutes later, because staying longer feels like letting him have more of me than he deserves.
In the elevator, descending back up into the normal world, I feel my chest tighten with a strange, sick grief.
Not for him.
For the girl I used to be.
The girl who believed her father was a victim.
The girl who believed the underworld was something outside her bloodline.
When I drive to my mother’s, she is in the kitchen.
She looks up from the stove, eyes immediately scanning me like she’s checking for new bruises. “Where were you?”
“Out,” I say.
She frowns. “That’s not an answer.”
I force a small smile, dry. “It’s technically an answer. Just not a satisfying one.”
My mother narrows her eyes, the same way she does when she knows I’m lying but doesn’t know where to place the concern. “Elara.”
“I’m fine,” I say automatically.
She sighs, like she’s exhausted by my favorite sentence. “You’re not fine. You’re just functioning.”
“I’m hungry,” I say abruptly.
She blinks, surprised. Then her face softens. “Good,” she says, relieved. “Sit. I made soup.”
I sit because it’s easier than fighting. I eat because she watches. I let her pretend she can feed me back into being safe.
After dinner, I back to my own place and open my laptop. The document is already there, waiting.
My article.
The one I’ve been re-writing over and over because it’s too close to confession.
It’s an article my mother can never read. An article my therapist would call “processing” and I would call “suicide.”
I stare at the blinking cursor like it’s daring me.
Then I continue typing.
I write his myth first, because myths are safer than men.
Vapor: the faceless hitman of the dark web. The man who kills with gas and toxin and silence. The ghost no one can catch. The monster who leaves no fingerprints because he doesn’t need hands.
Then, slowly, I peel the myth open.
I write about control. About captivity as structure. About the way fear rewires you until you can’t tell where your choices end and your survival begins.
I write about obsession, mine and his, and I don’t sanitize it. I don’t romanticize it either. I write it like a wound: raw, pulsing, ugly and honest.
I write about how monsters aren’t born in darkness.
They’re built.
I write about what happens when a monster meets a witness who refuses to look away.
I write about myself, too, in ways that make my hands shake. About the part of me that wanted truth more than safety. About the part of me that still wants to understand him, even now, even after everything.
The words spill out in a way that feels like bleeding.
It isn’t the kind of writing that wins awards. It’s the kind of writing that ruins lives. I stop only when my eyes blur and my throat feels tight and my fingers ache. I read it back once, and in the last paragraph, without planning it, I find myself writing something I didn’t intend to admit:
That the worst thing Vapor ever did to me was not abduct me.
It was make me feel seen.
Because abduction is a crime you can prosecute.
Captivity is a wound you can point to.
Fear is something the world understands.
But being seen by a man like him—
being recognized in a place where I should have been erased, is the kind of violation that doesn’t leave evidence.
I stare at those lines for a long time.
Then I delete nothing.
I save the file.